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The objectification of women in advertising
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The objectification of women in advertising
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Miranda Kerr says, “A rose can never be a sunflower, and a sunflower can never be a rose. All flowers are beautiful in their own way, and that’s like women too”. This message is not being sent to the viewers of many television shows today. America’s Next Top Model is a reality television show that takes a group of women and decides which one is the best model out of all of them. The winner gets a modeling contract and money. America’s Next Top Model makes people believe it is okay to judge young women on their beauty. It also portrays the unrealistic image of beauty that social media surrounds us with today. When competing on this show, young women will give up everything about themselves just to be ridiculed and to have their appearances …show more content…
After the first photo shoot, the judges decide on a new look for each and every one of the girls. They change their hair whether it be by cutting, dying, or extending it. Most of the time, the new hairstyle is the complete opposite of what the girl originally had. This change usually makes her very uncomfortable about the look. They also judge their make up. They send a very confusing message about the use of make up. In photo shoots, they wear a lot of make up, but when they return to be judged the judges expect them to have a natural look with minimal make up. I have watched episodes of this show in which a girl cries and cries over the new look she has been given. The girls are not given a choice about the new looks. If they do not want to change their look according to what the judges say then they are kicked off of the show. Some girls are not just upset at the moment and get over it, but they are continually upset throughout the rest of the show because they are not comfortable with their new look. This sends a message to the viewers that there is a need to change to be beautiful in the eyes of someone else. Young girls are especially vulnerable to this message because they want to be beautiful and are willing to do whatever it takes. They believe these people on the show because they are famous and know what they are doing. They will take the advice
Societal constructs of bodily perfection have a massive influence on both genders and on all ages. If you look at any magazine, you will see women constantly being compared to each other, whether it is in the “who wore it better” section or in the “do’s and don’ts” part of the magazine, comparing body images and overall appearances. All parts of the media that encompasses our daily lives are especially dangerous for young and impressionable teens because they see people being torn down for trying to express themselves, and are thus taught to not only don’t look like “don’ts”, but also look like the “do’s”. This is dangerous in that women in the magazine set very high standards that teens want to emulate, no matter the cost to themselves or their health. Celebrities have the benefit of media to make them appear perfect: Photoshop and makeup artists conceal the imperfections that are often too apparent to the naked eye. Viewing celebrities as exhibiting the ideal look or as idols will, in most cases, only damage the confidence of both young teens, and adults, and warp the reality of what true “beauty” really is. It makes teens never feel truly content with themselves because they will be aiming for an ideal that is physically impossible to attain and one that doesn’t exist in the real
People always say that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but what if the beholder is three judges who have seen the same type of beauty throughout their entire career. When Willowdean walks across the stage she is not the type of beauty queen that the judges are used to. Instead of going to pageant boot camp just to fit into her swimsuit, she fills every inch of her red with white polka dotted one piece. Although she might abhor her thunder thighs, she realizes that when she is on stage “no one boos. The world doesn’t end. The audience doesn’t go blind” (359). This type of mentality can be compared to that of twelve year-old Alana Thompson from the reality TV show, Toddlers and Tiaras. Alana started beauty pageants when she was six-years old and just like Willow was not the typical beauty queen. She is overweight for her age, but when she walks across the stage she exudes confidence. Though she had been told that she should not do pageants because of her weight, she did not listen and continued doing what she loved. Willowdean also experienced being told that
...as Miss USA and Miss Universe are competitions intended for mature, self-assured women who are capable of making their own decisions. Child beauty pageants, however, ruin childhoods and force them to grow up believing in their looks, rather than in themselves. It is no surprise, that emotional distress plagues the contestants that participate in beauty long after stepping off of the stage; subjecting young girls of any age to judgment and ridicule is not only humiliating but horrific to think that we are sitting back being entertained by their competitive nature. Rather than raising strong, confident girls who want to achieve the best in life; the parents and the hosts of these competitions provide a platform on which little girls are dressed up as skimpy Barbie dolls and paraded around, trying to achieve some form of perfection that shouldn’t exist in little girls.
I was flipping through some channels on the television set one day and came across a woman's talk show, "The View." It caught my attention when one of the hostesses asked the audience of mostly women to raise their hand if they thought they were truly beautiful. Much to my surprise the audience did not respond with very many show of hands. The hostess then introduced a study done by Dove, the makers of the body soap. Dove polled over 6,000 women from all over the country and only two percent of the women polled said they feel beautiful. Women are surrounded by images screaming physical beauty is more important than their talents and accomplishments. Women are deriving their self worth from an ideal of how they think they should look and how they think everyone else wants them to look instead of focusing on their sense of who they are, what they know, and where they are going in life. In "Help or Hindrance?: Women's Magazines Offer Readers Little But Fear, Failure," Mary Kay Blakely states, "Instead of encouraging women to grow beyond childish myths and adapt to the changes of life, women's magazines have readers running in place, exhausted." She goes on to say, "This is a world we have 'made up' for women, and it is a perilous place to exist." One of the biggest culprits feeding women's insecurities are the popular women's magazine that line the book shelves of grocery stores, gas stations, and waiting rooms. They supply readers and the occasional innocent passerby with unrealistic images of what women should be instead of showing diverse age groups and women with natural beauty. Reading through a couple of magazines, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Shape, I found nothing but hidden agendas and...
The way a woman was perceived as beautiful has changed so much even over the last 50 years as I have discussed previously. If we look at Marilyn Monroe and compare her to Tyra Banks, who has made it her passion in life to stretch the definition of beauty (Pozner, 2013) the difference is uncanny. Marilyn Monroe is the most acclaimed sex icon of the 1950’s and she was not astonishingly slender. Meanwhile Tyra banks up until a couple years ago had always been immeasurably skinny. Women nowadays are required to be excessively skinny, toned, tall, and have flawless skin if they want to fit into the “most beautiful” column. Although Tyra Banks presumably believes that she is an exceptional advocate for young girls in the media, she is also delivering a skewed image of self-love through her show, America’s Next Top Model (Pozner, 2013). Every woman on that show either fits the media’s standard of an ideal woman, or they are ridiculed/questioned. The media is making it impossible to achieve such high standards. Even for black women, there is the stereotype that they have to have huge behinds and appear to be super ghetto like Nicki Minaj; even she received cosmetic surgery to enhance her bust and rear, as well as slimming her waist. She did all these things to appease her viewers. It is impossible for women to achieve these different standards
Children beauty pageants encourage young girl’s to wear make-up, dress in fancy, expensive clothes, and prove to the judges they have what it takes to beat the other contestants. Jessica Bennett states in Tales of a Modern Diva “But this, my friends, is the new normal: a generation that primps and dyes and pulls and shapes, younger and with more vigor. Girls today are salon vets before they enter elementa...
Fashion models don’t need to be thin, they need to be diverse and healthy at whatever weight that is. Not everyone is supposed to be thin, some women are big boned and curvy, others are naturally slim and small boned, some are tall, others are short, some are light skinned and others are darker. So many diverse looks exist in the world today and the fashion industry need to change their perception of perfect. Body image in our society is out of control. We have young men and women comparing themselves to unrealistic models and images in the media and feeling bad about the way their own bodies look because they somehow don’t measure up. (Dunham, 2011) The struggle for models to be thin has led to models becoming anorexic or bulimic, untimely deaths, and inferiority complexes. Even worse is the fact that they influence a whole generation of young women who look up to these models and think “thin” is how they are supposed to be. They influence what we buy, how we eat and what we wear. Why has this specific group captured our attention so much? Why do we seem to be so fascinated in their lives, to the point where we try to look and act just like them? The media is largely to be blamed for this, many people believe the media has forced the notion that everything supermodels do is ideal. Others believe that the society is to be blamed because we have created a fascination with their lives. There are many opinions, and I agree with both of these specific opinions. We allow ourselves to be captivated by these people's lives, and the media portrayal of their lives seem to also enthrall us. (Customessaymeister, 2013) Despite the severe risks of forcing models to become too thin, designers, fashion editors, fashion brands and agencies still ...
...ow they truly are. They must follow what the producers set up for them to do. The photo shoots they participate in are often stereotypical for each girl’s race. They are dressed according to their race and are told how to act, so the picture looks acceptable to how a person of their race looks. The constants on the show are completely stripped of their natural selves and are “clothed” with stereotypes. She writes how the stereotypes serve as a negative purpose. The stereotypes presented in the show America’s Next Top Model has the level of interest viewers are looking for in television shows because it involves drama viewers are searching for when watching television. Stereotypes should not be introduced in media because kids and teenagers are constantly watching what is on TV, and that is a negative and insensitive way of displaying different races and ethnicities.
To begin, social media has created unrealistic standards for young people, especially females. Being bombarded by pictures of females wearing bikinis or minimal clothing that exemplifies their “perfect” bodies, squatting an unimaginable amount of weight at a gym while being gawked at by the opposite sex or of supermodels posing with some of life’s most desirable things has created a standard that many young people feel they need to live up to. If this standard isn’t reached, then it is assumed that they themselves are not living up to the norms or the “standards” and then therefore, they are not beautiful. The article Culture, Beauty and Therapeutic Alliance discusses the way in which females are bombarded with media messages star...
In American culture today, society's view of beauty is controlled by Hollywood, where celebrities are constantly in the lime-light. The media watches Hollywood's every move, and is quick to ridicule “A-listers” whenever they dare to gain a few pounds or to let an uncontrollable pimple show. The media has created a grossly distorted mental image of what should be considered beautiful, and with almost every junior high and high school-age girl reading and viewing this message, the idea has been instilled in them as well. This view of beauty is causing many teenage girls to become obsessed with a highly problematic and unattainable goal of perfection.
The concept of “beauty” is something that everyone feels, thinks, or wants, in order to fit society’s standards. In today’s society, we are often faced with the unrealistic ideals of what beauty is. Due to society’s constant portraying of unrealistic beauty ideals, this reinforces a negative influence upon women’s idea of beauty, resulting in a negative impact in their confidence, and self-esteem, which leads to others, specifically women to be manipulated by society’s corrupted outlook of what beauty is. To add onto this issue, we are constantly surrounded by sources of this negative influence in our everyday lives, including magazines, television, advertisements, and so on. However, women specifically, are more prone to be victims of this negative effect, thus will have more pressure upon themselves to match society’s idea of “beauty,” which includes unrealistic and sometimes unattainable beauty standards. Women especially, can sometimes be so deeply manipulated by society’s unrealistic ideals of what is beautiful, such that it’s possible that they don’t even realize it Furthermore, in order to do so, women often will receive negative impacts rather than positive impacts, such as in their confidence and self-esteem. The negative effects of society’s beauty ideals also lead women to have an overall corrupted idea of what is “beautiful.” Society creates unrealistic ideals of beauty towards women through the media by creating an unrealistic image of what women should look like to be considered beautiful. Men negatively affect women’s idea of beauty by using the unrealistic beauty standards exposed by society which further pressures women to try to fit society’s idea of what is beautiful. Beauty pageants negatively affect women’s ov...
Society is now so used to seeing these models who have their beauty and superiority idolized that they feel all women must look this way. However, looking like a model is becoming increasingly unattainable. According to Bennett the difference between the catwalk and reality is so stark that the slightest change in a girls form makes them self-conscious because they are constantly sizing themselves up to models (Bennett). Today models are dramatically thinner and taller than they were a few years a...
Many young girls are forced to wear preposterous outfits and enormous amounts of makeup that deny them of their innocence at a young age. Beauty contests are meant more for adult women who are mature enough to understand all that’s going on and can handle losing competitions to the other contestants. Children should not be able to compete in pageants because of the harmful effects on self-confidence and character. Some people think they are good and some do not agree that they are good. (Leo, 2014)
" Money, ratings and attention fuel the pageant/dance media machine, with parents and adults reaping the benefits. Purpose of Child Beauty Pageants For these young pageant girls, brains before beauty is not the case. Real-world priorities such as schooling, family, and friends are trumped by tiaras, makeup, and evening gowns. More value is often placed on being beautiful in the eyes of the judges, than on each girl’s individuality.
Parents of the pageant world dont always understand how provocative and wrong it is to dress their children up in show outfits or giving the child additives to make them look better. Sadly, some parents find this ‘cute’ or ‘fun’. They don't seem to understand how doing this to their children can change their attitudes in a negative way as they grow up. For example, some parents have dressed their children up as Dolly Parton, the ‘street walker’ from pretty woman, and much more. A pageant mom quoted this “I’d rather she be perfect and have a little frozen face. Some people say her eyebrows look a little pulled already but they look striking” (Child Beauty Pageants are Abuse). This type of behavior from a parent should not be acceptable. Another pageant mom who is a trained beautician said this “I’ll make her frown before injecting, which helps identify a potential wrinkle.” (Child Beauty Pag...